Pages

Friday, February 11, 2011

Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Flowers for Algernon is written by Daniel Keyes and I have been wanting to read it since I first saw its book introduction. I find that I usually like books that are more in the category of Sci-Fi or Mystery, and books I like usually have interesting or intense plot lines.

Last week, I finally got this book out from the library and read it in one day. It was very good book which I thoroughly enjoyed, even though I liked the beginning part—the start—a lot better than what happened after. This seems to be the case with almost all the books I have read. I find that many novels have amazing beginnings and/or settings, but many of them have abrupt endings that are quite disappointing. For example, The Chrysalids by John Wyndom was a very exciting book to read, as it described how a group of telepaths was able to escape from the society's prosecution. However, at the end everything happened very quickly, and all of a sudden the main characters were rescued by people from another place that accepted telepathy. I thought there could be something more in the ending.

Similarly, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury at first described very well a society where books were not allowed, and where all unhappy thoughts or ideas were disapproved. However, it also had a quite abrupt ending with the main character's city being bombed and destroyed. I found that many points or ideas could be explained more, which would have made the book seem a lot more complete.
Unlike The Chrysalids and Fahrenheit 451, Flowers for Algernon have both an astonishing start as well as a well thought-out ending, and everything was logical. I guess logic is very important for any sort of text. Without good logic, how can a piece of text convince the reader? Perhaps this is the reason why I liked And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie. Not only was it very suspenseful, everything was backed up by logic so that there was no way for one to argue about an event or an action of a character.

---
I went off-topic a little, and the connectivity between sentences wasn't very good. However, I do have more to say about Flowers For Algernon. In fact, the sole reason why I went off-topic was because I had too many things that I wanted to say for the book, and I felt that it'd be better if I split the ideas/ contents into several blog posts. I hope I will be able to finish writing about Flowers for Algernon soon.